Every year at Halloween, our middle school has a costume parade and contest and the morning is culminated by each grade level doing an all-grade dance off. This year the 8th graders had the song, “Let’s do the Time Warp Again” as their music. There is usually a teacher or two in charge but the kids are given a lot of control over the choreography, at least the 8th graders are.

It made me laugh having grown up with the Rocky Horror Picture Show for most of my young adult life. Watching it at midnight in the late 70s in edgy movie theaters with audience members opening umbrellas at the rain scene, audience callbacks, audiences using flashlights coinciding with night time scenes in the movie, and the resounding choral repetition of “Dammit Janet” (spoken along with the character Brad, of course, and yes, Janet played by the very young Susan Sarandon), here I was today, some 40 years later, watching this song embraced by our mainstream school, our 8th graders dancing to its rhythm and lyrics—no edginess here. I’m not sure if it felt like life had come full circle or had made some kind of perverted closure, but I certainly felt like I was in some kind of an unexpected but undeniably certifiable time warp.